Project Cowork Signs Year’s Biggest Downtown San Antonio Lease

A coworking company has leased the top three floors of a historic San Antonio building, the largest new office lease downtown in a year.

San Antonio-based Project Cowork signed for 19,000 square feet of the Legal Professional Building at 200 Main Plaza, a riverfront property built in 1915, across the street from the Bexar County courthouse. Project Cowork will gear the offices to attorneys and other “client-facing businesses,” according to Stream Realty Partners.

The ground floor still has almost 7,000 square feet available for retail or office use.

The Legal Professional Building served as a city jail, police station and health department until 1962. Investor group Witz Realty bought the building in 2015 and reopened it in 2023 after more than three years of renovation.

Stream’s Harry Adams and Talaya Frazier represented Witz Realty in the deal.

The lease is Project Cowork’s fifth in the metro. It also has two locations in Castle Hills near the San Antonio International Airport, one in the Dignowity Hill neighborhood near downtown, and one in suburban Helotes.

Other Texas metros have surpassed San Antonio in the coworking market — DFW was the second-biggest coworking market in the country in the fourth quarter — but the industry grew notably in San Antonio this year. San Antonio added 128,000 square feet of coworking space in the first quarter, an increase of 18 percent from the previous quarter and the highest jump in the nation, according to Yardi Matrix’s CoworkingCafe.

As of the second quarter, Dallas leads Texas in coworking space with 275 locations spanning 5 million square feet. Houston follows with 219 spaces over 4.4 million square feet. San Antonio has 58 spaces and more than 800,000 square feet.

Greater Los Angeles leads the country in coworking, with over 300 spaces and nearly 7 million square feet.Due in part to slow construction, the San Antonio office market’s vacancy rate was 17.6 percent in the first quarter, well below the national average as well as the average of other Texas metros. However, vacancy ticked up in the second quarter, according to Partners.